College

The coaches of the Final Four teams all expressed a bit of surprise and concern over one of the sport’s big stories this postseason, the hiring of Tyler Summitt as the new head coach at Louisiana Tech.

While they don’t question all the knowledge Summitt has gained over the years as the son of Tennessee’s legendary former coach Pat Summitt, they wonder if he won’t be at least a little overwhelmed since he is only 23 years old with just two years experience as an assistant coach at Marquette.

“Actually when I was 23 I was driving a truck for a friend of mine, for my dad's friend who owned five supermarkets,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “I'm not sure that I was confident that I was going to be able to keep that job, so I wasn't really in a position to do anything like I guess Tyler is going to be doing at Louisiana Tech.”

“Heck, I was 30 when I got the job here at Connecticut, and that was my first head coaching job,” he added, “and I thought I knew everything about everything. Two years later I realized I didn't know anything about anything. So I'm sure he's going to be overwhelmed at times, and I'm sure he's got a lot of great ideas that he's going to implement, and I'm sure he's going to have a great staff that's going to help him, but that's just a tall task for a 30 year old, much less a 23 year old.”

Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw said the position can be overwhelming at times, not so much in terms of managing the game and teaching Xs and Os, but in terms of all the responsibilities that come with it. She said when she looks back, she wonders how she managed to coach high school at age 23, and taking on a Division I program is infinitely more difficult.

“When you're in that position as a young coach, there's so many things that you don't know in terms of running a program,” McGraw said. “Recruiting is important, the community, the alumni. There's so many things, handling budgets and just taking care of managing a staff and doing so many things that I don't know how you do it at that age. I think that most people have been assistant coaches for a long time when they get the head coaching job. It's a very difficult transition, and I don't think I would have been prepared for that at 23.”

She said she thought it was a lot easier to get started at a younger age when she did back in the 1980’s, and Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer echoed those sentiments.

VanDerveer became a head coach at age 25 and said there were a lot of people from her generation like Theresa Grentz, Marianne Stanley and Rene Portland who got a chance to begin at a young age because women’s basketball was in its infancy. Schools were paying relatively nothing back then, so they didn’t demand a lot of experience. VanDerveer had only two years of experience as an assistant when she got her first head coaching job at Idaho.

“I had really, I think, been working hard to become a coach. But I can't even look back at it. I can't even believe I was a head coach when I was that young,” VanDerveer said. “It's just so many kind of things that I guess you just don't know when you're that young. Kind of the opportunity to get experience of working in a great program is what young people have now for the most part. It's very different.”

Maryland coach Brenda Frese said she would have been a wreck if she tried to coach a Division I basketball team at age 23 today.

“Yeah, I would not have been in a position to be able to handle that animal, especially how much women's basketball has changed with the media attention and everything you have to balance,” Frese said. “The one thing I will say for Tyler Summitt is he has experience on his side. You can't underestimate the fact that when you grow up with the game and have as many games under his belt that he's had as a child and through his experiences with Pat, I'm sure he is more than ready. He has been learning all those years under her, so I'm sure that he will do a tremendous job.”

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conservative1 wrote on Apr 3, 2014 8:18 PM:

" I believe his mother was about the same age, wasn't she?

This is just the lesbian crowd. They get upset whenever a man is hired to coach in "their" league. "

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